Slow Burn and Babylon Berlin offer historical lenses on our troubling present

When we look back on our current political and cultural situation and its particular stew of corruption, authoritarianism, populism, and racism, what moments will be worth remembering? Will we recognize history as it is being made? 

Two recent pop-culture offerings address these questions by looking backward in order to help us look forward. One is Slow Burn, an eight-part podcast about the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, created for Slate by Andrew Parsons and Leon Neyfakh, who also hosts the show. Even though the creators turn to the past for insight into our own moment, they keep the contemporary parallels at arm’s length in order to explore less well known angles on the Watergate era. Using original sources, present-day interviews, and careful narration, each episode tries to convey what it felt like to live through the scandal without the certainty of hindsight.

Without that certainty, details shift in importance. Take the first episode, “Martha,” about Martha Mitchell, the wife of President Richard Nixon’s attorney general and erstwhile campaign manager, John Mitchell. As is now largely forgotten, Martha was kidnapped and drugged to prevent her from talking about the scandal to the press in the lead-up to the 1972 election. Martha was a personality most Americans would have known well in the early 1970s but almost no one remembers today.